Top Three Questions Every Law Enforcement Survey Should Include
When crafting a survey for your agency, it’s important to understand what questions will most benefit you and your community members. After having helped law enforcement agencies around the country create their own surveys, here are the top three questions that I believe every law enforcement survey should include:
1. Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most common way for private-sector companies to understand their customers, and taking a similar approach yields great results for law enforcement agencies as well. Specifically, you’re looking for your “promoters” and your “detractors.” Promoters will score a 9–10 on this scale. Your promoters are the ones that are most likely to come to your defense public during trying times. Detractors will score 0–6. Your detractors are often sharing their negative opinions of your agency with others, exponentially growing negative public perception. Everyone in between is a “passive.” Your passives may lean either way, depending on how much interaction they have with “promoters” or “detractors.” Once you understand how many promoters and detractors you have, you can create initiatives to help move the needle on the detractors and the passives.
Once you establish a baseline Net Promoter Score, you can measure the scores over time. The goal is to increase your promoters and decrease your detractors. A Net Promoter Score is a very important indicator of how the community feels about your agency. In fact, if you are going to send out a quick 1-question survey, this question is the one I’d recommend!
Your Net Promoter Score can be as simple as “Do you trust the Pawnee Police Department?” With a scale of 0–10.
2. Free Text Field
This might be a controversial viewpoint, but including a free text field in your survey is critical to capturing valuable feedback. This is where you’ll learn the most from your customers, both good and bad. Including a simple, free text field that says “Is there anything more you’d like to add?” allows the customer to praise an officer’s good work or complain about the dangerous intersection at 1st/Main. A customer complaint in the free text field gives you an opportunity to identify liabilities and investigate them without having to go through a slow, expensive, formal complaint review process. The earlier you identify liabilities, the more time you have to prevent them from becoming serious issues in the future.
The downside: At scale, this field can be more difficult to measure, but you can set up automations to look for “keywords” if you’re receiving too many responses to measure.
Bonus: Our CEO, Rahul Sidhu, likes to recommend that agencies consider adding an additional free text field that asks if a particular officer deserves to be commended for his or her efforts. This is an easy way to consistently give kudos to officers who go above and beyond, helping improve morale and reinforce good habits.
3. Question that Focuses on Current Initiatives
Whatever initiatives your agency is putting effort into, the best thing to do is to ask your customers if you’re making an impact. You could ask about coffee-with-a-cop, victims services & advocacy, town halls, social media platforms, your national night out, or your new divisional commands.
If an initiative is important to your agency, ask a quantifiable question about it! Or, if you’re thinking of adopting a new type of outreach, ask the customer what they’d prefer. You’ll learn a lot about what is most important to your customers, allowing you to make more informed decisions about where you spend your money.
Here is an example of this type of question:
What new initiatives would you love to see the police department offer to the community?
● Coffee-with-a-cop
● Town halls
● Neighborhood watch meetings
● K9 visit at local fair
● Sponsoring a basketball tournament
● Other: (free text)
When putting together a survey, it’s important to learn from the community and use it as a feedback loop. Allow them to rate you, and then track those ratings over time. With enough data, you can break these responses down into variables such as customer type and location (division, beat, neighborhood). This is a critical part of customer service that can often be overlooked by law enforcement agencies.
